9 Things the next Gilmore Girls revival needs

If it's going to be any good

More than three months on from Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life's post-Thanksgiving premiere comes the surprising yet not-really-surprising news that a second revival could be happening at Netflix. Fan reactions to the news seems to be running the gamut from excitement to caution to outright resistance — after all, AYITL inspired a whole lot of feelings among fans, and not all of them were positive. Here, nine things the second Gilmore Girls revival needs to deliver in order to be worth it.

1. Justice for Lane Kim

Gilmore Girls

By far the worst aspect of season seven, the only GGseason not written by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, was what it did to Lane Kim and her rock ’n’ roll dreams. In a weirdly sex-negative twist, Lane’s very first time with her husband Zack was so awful that it basically put her off sex forever — and got her pregnant with twins. Far from undoing the damage, A Year in the Life only doubled down on Lane’s sad fate, revealing that she never left Stars Hollow, now works at her mom’s antique store, and sometimes reunites with Hep Alien to play quietly depressing sets in their living room.

To add insult to injury, Lane’s total screen time in the revival was around 10 minutes, most of which was spent as a near-silent sounding board for Rory’s problems. And Paris and Doyle split up, but Lane is somehow still with Zack, with whom she never had any chemistry and actually seemed to kind of hate? Uggggh. If another revival happens, giving Lane the space she deserves has to be priority no. 1. Have Rory ask Lane how her life is going for once! Is she happy in Stars Hollow? Is working at her mom’s store all she wants? Why did she give up on her dreams of moving to the big city and pursuing a music career? (And no, the fact that she has kids is not an answer.) Rory gets to drift around New York blowing career opportunities left and right, but poor Lane doesn’t even get to take a run at her dreams?

2. Rory's self-awareness

Gilmore Girls

After watching Rory’s behavior in A Year in the Life, it’s tough to root for Team Jess, or Team Logan, or Team Dean. Instead, I’m shipping Rory/self-awareness, and I’m shipping it hardcore, because I want to love Rory Gilmore again.

For everyone who tried defending Rory with some variation on this tired old argument: “Viewers have no problem with male anti-heroes like Walter White, this is sexist” … no. The issue is not that Rory has flaws. The issue is that Rory, and everyone around her, seems completely oblivious to her bad behavior. If everybody in Breaking Bad had worshipped the ground Walt walked on, that show would have been super annoying too.

Even Gilmore Girls' creators are doing it, calling her non-career a byproduct of the fact that journalism is a tough industry. No. There are plenty of opportunities in journalism, particularly for a young woman as privileged as Rory. The problem is that Rory’s an incompetent, lazy journalist who falls asleep during interviews, never has stories to pitch, and can’t identify a news hook when it’s staring her right in the face (She. Found. People. Standing. In. Line. For. Nothing. That article writes itself!). And then there’s Rory’s inexplicably mistreated boyfriend Paul, and her ongoing affair with her engaged ex-boyfriend Logan, whose baby she is probably pregnant with.

If another revival happens, Rory needs a meet-cute with self-awareness. Let her acknowledge her mistakes — and not in a half-assed, throwaway line like, "I can't believe the way I treated him," re: Paul — and grow from them.

3. Shorter episodes

Pacing was a big issue with A Year in the Life — some set pieces felt endless, like Stars Hollow: The Musical or Lorelai’s Wild journey, while other storylines felt weirdly truncated, like Paris’s struggles, and Lorelai and Emily’s therapy sessions. (WTF happened with that mysterious letter?) This off-putting mix of padding and loose ends could be solved by returning to the show’s original 45-minute format, or compromising with hour-long episodes. GG’s meandering, slice-of-life storytelling just doesn’t seem to lend itself well to feature-length movies.

4. A break from Life and Death Brigade shenanigans

Gilmore Girls

That picture above is setting my teeth on edge. Everything about the Life and Death Brigade sequence in "Fall" was infuriating — the weird tonal shift to magical realism, the inordinate amount of screen time it took up, the fact that Rory is fine with Logan and his cronies wreaking havoc in Stars Hollow. These douchebags were irritating enough when they were Ivy League bros, but now they’re just thirtysomethings in Halloween costumes vandalizing a small town in order to facilitate their buddy cheating on his fiancée. Let Rory’s ridiculously lengthy Wizard of Oz good-bye be the final time we see Colin, Finn, and Robert, because the idea of an LADB-organized baby shower is too horrifying to contemplate.

5. Closure for Jess

Gilmore Girls

Milo Ventimiglia’s This Is Us schedule was to blame at least in part for his brief screen time in AYITL, and that may still be a factor if and when the second revival shoots. But it wouldn’t require a ton of screen time for Jess to have a little more closure than he did. That lingering glance he gave Rory through the window, right after Luke brought her up, has been mostly interpreted as evidence that he’s still not over her — but they were together for a few months, more than a decade ago.

Jess has matured so much over the years that it’s kind of sad to leave him pining, even if it is meant to parallel Luke’s pining for Lorelai when the original show began.

6. A believable career path for Rory

Depending on when the theoretical second revival picks up, Rory's pregnancy is likely to be her primary focus, but let's hope her aspirations don't get put on indefinite hold in Lane Kim-style. Paris has managed to have both children and a career, albeit off-screen, so we know it is at least theoretically possible in this universe.

So ... can we just get real here? No publisher is going to buy a memoir about being the child of a single mom in a quirky small town. As McSweeney’s neatly put it, “the current narrative arc belongs to your mother and happens almost exclusively off the page.” Jess may be in the publishing business, but his “write what you know” advice is the absolute last thing Rory needs to hear.

Throughout A Year in the Life, I kept waiting for the turn in Rory’s career arc, the thing that would finally make her passionate and driven again. There were a lot of false starts: the offer to teach at Chilton, the GQ assignment, the Stars Hollow Gazette job, but none of them went anywhere. We’re meant to believe that writing Gilmore Girls is the turn, but in no universe does that book sell. Rory needs to find a career that isn’t all about her. At this point, I’ll take literally anything.

7. Better communication between Luke and Lorelai

Gilmore Girls

Communication issues have been a constant throughout Luke and Lorelai's relationship, and so a lot of their drama in AYITL made sense: Luke's laconic, Lorelai's a motormouth, and it's easy for them to just talk right past each other without really connecting. But these people have been together for more than a decade by this point, and the fact they'd apparently never talked about the possibility of having a baby before is nuts. Now that they're married, and Lorelai's grief over Richard isn't as fresh, it would be good to see a little more of how their relationship works day to day, and what's kept them together this time.

8. Michel’s husband

The decision to finally make Michel canonically gay, which network television presumably prevented back in the day, was glorious. But not bothering to even cast Frederic kind of sucks, especially when they had budget left over for Rachel Ray. A second revival could focus on Rory’s pregnancy — with Michel and Frederic’s adoption process as a complementary B-plot.

9. Rory reading books

Honestly, everything bad about Rory in the revival might have been bearable if she’d still been a bookworm. Several articles in the wake of AYITL pointed out that Rory is barely ever seen with a book — she’s seen reading Anna Karenina by the pool, but is mostly too busy fat-shaming strangers to really pay attention (she’s read that one before, anyway). Did she love The Goldfinch or agree with the backlash? Does she appreciate the guilty pleasures of Fifty Shades of Grey? How did she feel about the ending of Gone Girl? A sense that Rory’s still up on contemporary literature would go a long way to making her feel like the Gilmore we know and love.

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